In all there are ten interviews. I’ve embedded just a few of them below. (I offer them without meaning to imply I think these best as I haven’t—yet!—heard them all myself, nor in any order of ‘merit’.)

If you want to run through them all, start on the first video and let YouTube take you through them – on completing one, it’ll start the next. Each is only about a minute long.

For myself, of those I’ve heard I liked some of Richard Wilson’s thoughts –

Genes aren’t ‘always on’, they are regulated. In addition to the potions of our genome that code for functional RNAs—whether they are functional as RNAs or mRNAs that are translated into proteins—there are the regions that determine when these genes become active in our bodies and what cell types of our bodies use which particular genes. These, too, are inherited and are linked the phenotype, the physical and biochemical properties of a creature – the ‘output’ of the genes.

Furthermore, increasingly genomes are though of in terms of larger regulatory units, chromatin loops that genes are part of that are defined by boundary elements and insulators. (I’ve touched on this in an older post.) These larger regulatory settings also relate to different phenotypes.

So, as Richard Wilson suggested, perhaps it’s best not to get too hung up on precisely what a gene might be defined as and more pragmatically focus on what variation occurs and what that variation says about how genomes are organised and controlled – ?

Code for Life is the blog of Dr Grant Jacobs who has wide-ranging interests in science-related subjects, especially genetics, bioinformatics and science communication. To learn more about Code for Life (topics, copyright, comments, writing), see the introductory page Twitter: @BioinfoTools

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